This is the last in a series of excerpts from Elements of Data Science, now available from Lulu.com and online booksellers. This article is based on the Recidivism Case Study, which is about algorithmic fairness. The goal of the case study is to explain the statistical arguments presented in two articles from 2016: Both are about COMPAS, a statistical tool used in the justice system to assign defendants a “risk score” that is intended to reflect the risk that they... Read More Read More

This is the fifth in a series of excerpts from Elements of Data Science, now available from Lulu.com and online booksellers. It’s based on Chapter 16, which is part of the political alignment case study. You can read the complete example here, or run the Jupyter notebook on Colab. Because this is a teaching example, it builds incrementally. If you just want to see the results, scroll to the end! Chapter 16 is a template for exploring relationships between political... Read More Read More

This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from Elements of Data Science, now available from Lulu.com and online booksellers. It’s from Chapter 15, which is part of the political alignment case study. You can read the complete chapter here, or run the Jupyter notebook on Colab. In the previous chapter, we used data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to plot changes in political alignment over time. In this notebook, we’ll explore the relationship between political alignment and... Read More Read More

The premise of Think Stats, and the other books in the Think series, is that programming is a tool for teaching and learning — and many ideas that are commonly presented in math notation can be more clearly presented in code. In the draft third edition of Think Stats there is almost no math — not because I made a special effort to avoid it, but because I found that I didn’t need it. For example, here’s how I present... Read More Read More

I’ve written before about changes in marriage patterns in the U.S., and it’s one of the examples in Chapter 13 of the new third edition of Think Stats. My analysis uses data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Today they released the most recent data, from surveys conducted in 2022 and 2023. So here are the results, updated with the newest data: The patterns are consistent with what we’ve see in previous iterations — each successive cohort marries... Read More Read More